Cuba is the best destination of your Cultural Holidays
Cuba is the best place for enjoying your best Cultural Cuba Holidays. Due to the fact that this is a country with a cultural heritage which is improved every day where all art manifestations are gifts to the visitors that like to spend their luxury holidays in Cuba. This beautiful island has much more to offer you than its history, tradition, beautiful beaches and wonderful places; it has a huge cultural treasure to share with you on this magic all inclusive holidays in Cuba. You will realize that Cuba is living a boom of creativity and has achieved that its trends are increasingly in all over the world.
The mixes of Spanish, African elements, the great European currents, the American sensibility, both the Latin and the other one, are tributaries of the Cuban culture, a phenomenon characterized by its diversity and wealth. You can be part of this movement while you are enjoying this Cuba Holidays.
Cuban Culture has lots of lovers not only in Cuba but also all around the world. That is why Cuban artists have a broad and permanent audience in the island including yourself that come to Cuba to spend your luxury holidays because you are also in love with the Cuban Culture. Cinemas are crowded with the exhibitions of each Cuban film. Symphonic music and ballet daily witness an increasing number of fans. Cuba is more and more a country of books and readers. Museums, theatres and cultural houses are live spaces attended by connoisseurs to meet their likes and people who attend the performances out of curiosity and there is always an empty space waiting for you, in every theatre, museum or art exhibition, on this Cuba Holidays. However, one of the art manifestations that attract the most the attention of every Cuba Holidays makers is Cuban painting.
Cuban painting: a gift on this summer holidays
Once you are enjoying your package holidays in Cuba with the aim of knowing more of Cuban culture you will find out that Cuban painting was not born out of spontaneous action. Such painters as EstebAn ChartrAn, the first ever to insert palm trees and mahoganies, two of Cuba s most representative trees, in landscape paintings; Juan Bautista Vermay, Founder of San Alejandro Painting School and smeared that centre with his own style, were among those who put Cuban painting on the map back in the 19th Century. Both artists applied knowledge learned in Paris. Later on, the names of Menocal, Collazo and RomaNach ought to be mentioned. These three painters stood out in Cuban arts during the so-called Golden Age of Cuban painting initiated by Victor Manuel, Amelia PelAez and others. The island nation s most outstanding painters were those with a Paris formation. This leads to splitting the history of Cuba s painting in two great periods: before and after the impressionist trend in Europe; before and after Victor Manuel s presence in Cuba. Though not an impressionist himself, Victor Manuel learned in Paris the first fruitful lesson about Cuban art: the freedom to choose one particular trend to express oneself, thus breaking away from the established schools.
This path was paved on the basis of sketch-drawing, lighting and colouring combinations not seen before in Cuban painting, a trend followed by painters with personal styles of their own like Wilfredo Lam, Rene Portocarrero, Ponce, Carlos Enriquez and many others. Today s Cuban painters, with styles of their own, too, flow together into a trend other than the rest of the world s current style. And that would be your style, the cultural style that will colour this Caribbean Holidays in Cuba.
There is no complete education without the appropriate knowledge of arts
There is no complete education without the appropriate knowledge of arts. Once you enter inside the Cuban cultural world during your Cuba Holidays you will have the possibility of visiting the schools that were created based on this fact. The National School of Art opened its doors in 1962. Almost five decades after, the many international awards granted to its students and graduates back the Cuban artistic teaching system which features 46 schools all over the island.
The Higher Art Institute founded in 1976 is the colophon of this project. Outstanding cultural personalities are teaching in this institution, representatives of the most advanced trends and lines of thinking, both in the pedagogic field as well as in that of creation. When you visit this marvellous place as part of your all inclusive holidays in Cuba you will have the opportunity of personally know significant cultural personalities that are teaching in its classrooms, in addition to young artists coming from some 15 countries that studied there their university education and were linked to many artistic projects of the institutional system of the Cuban culture. One of the schools that you have to visit on this summer holidays is the San Alejandro Painting School, the key stone of a lot of world wide famous Cuban Painters and a marvellous place where art is recreated in time.
Servando Cabrera: a remarkable figure of the Cuban Culture
Thanks to this Cuba holidays you will be able to know more about this outstanding figures of the Cuban Culture and give an intimate glance at Servando Cabrera, one of the most remarkable painters of all times.
The bustling and elegant Paseo Avenue, in Havana's Vedado neighbourhood -a place famous for its magnificent mansions- is home to a singular museum. This museum devoted to this artist -a 20th-century eclectic mansion lodged in the heart of Havana- harbours will be one of the top places on your visiting list on this Cuba Holidays. It gathers the most comprehensive exhibition and documental compilation dedicated to the great master of Cuba's contemporary fine arts. This magnificent place treasures the work of Servando Cabrera Moreno who was born in Havana 1923and died in 1981, a memorial site specially dedicated to the memory of an artist whose departure from this world occurred quite soon.
Only as part of this all inclusive holidays in Cuba you can appreciate this exhibit that includes a wide collection of his memorable paintings and drawings, while the house recreates the intimate life of Mr. Cabrera, with photographs of relatives and friends, fine pieces of furniture, porcelain, travel mementos and other items, everything put together in a genuine Cuban style. Some of the painter's belongings, a small gallery of works created by other Cuban artists, plus a compilation of Cuba's decorative and popular arts -as well as from other parts of the world- are displayed in this museum, coupled with scores of keepsakes Mr. Cabrera bought or was presented with in his trip around the globe.
Cabrera's paintings are lile holidays full of colours, sensuality and enthusiasm
After visiting this amazing place on this package holidays, you will agree with the Cuban essayist and critic Graziella Pogolotti once put it, "Servando Cabrera Moreno is the isolated artist of Cuba's fine arts, a man who does not fit in the pre-established layouts of generations and schools, who walked through all of them like a lonesome hiker, heeding nothing but the demands of his artistic consciousness."
Thus, those who pause and take a long look at the museum's halls on their summer holidays, could be in a position to make a fair judgment. The drawings and paintings hold the key to understanding and enjoying Mr. Cabrera's artistic creation -academic, abstractionism, expressionism- that is thoroughly culled in topics as follows: Drawings, Servando in Three Times, Omens, Erotic Art (1974-1979) and Erotic Art (1981).
There you will find his fine drawings of delicate female faces, robust peasants and Cuban militiamen; naked torsos and bodies that get tangled up and tend to confuse, many of them shaped as vegetables, and the awesome collection of erotic paintings, splayed in large-scale canvasses and brimming with light, colour and intense sensuality. You will see the essence of this Cuba holidays reflects on Cabrera's painting a holidays full of colours, sensuality and enthusiasm.
Hemmed in by shrubs and trees, the small palace -carefully restored and equipped with high-tech museum techniques- is also outfitted with a library and archive specialized in the art, the works and the life of the artist. The Garden of Statues, featuring major pieces of some of the finest Cuban artists, is decked out against a huge mural of Marta Arjona, the late Cuban ceramist and curator. As you can see, you will find the best of the Cuban culture gathered in a place that is waiting for you with open arms on this Cuba Holidays.
Bent on preserving and highlighting the country's artistic collective memory, the Servando Cabrera Moreno Museum opens up a new space that enriches the spiritual life of the Cuban people and troves of all Cuba Holidays makers from other parts of the planet eager to take a closer glimpse at the cultural legacy the island nation's capital cherishes so dearly.
Agustin Bejerano: another example of the quality of Cuban Art
Another example of the quality of Cuban art is Agustin Bejarano. This talented painter was born in Camaguey in the year 1964. He is by far one of Cuba's top contemporary fine artists. This many-sided creator has excelled as an engraver, drawer and painter. Since his first personal exhibit -mounted at the Alejo Carpertier Gallery in his hometown back in 1979- those who have followed his paintings have had the chance of going through more than 45 personal expositions in the turf and overseas. This summer holidays offers you the unique opportunity of attending to one of his world famous exhibition. This will be an experience to remember of your Caribbean holidays in Cuba.
His works of art have made the rounds in Puerto Rico's San Juan, Mexico City, Monterrey, Zurich, Tokyo, Zaragoza, Santo Domingo and Toronto. He has also taken part in scores of collective expositions and has grabbed countless national and international awards in the three categories mentioned at the top of this article.
"The Rites of Silence": Not to miss on your Cuba Holidays.
Always reinventing himself, Bejarano now presents The Rites of Silence. Asked about the artist's new vision, this is what outstanding fine arts expert and writer Caridad Blanco had to say: "Agustin Bejarano's work is basically a rewriting of genres." His latest collection is pointedly leaning to the representation of a landscape that swerves off from the more traditional painting. Discovering the style of this one of a kind Cuban artist will be a challenge on this Cuba Holidays. Therefore, you will find out that there are no classical sketches or lines, but as an experienced surgeon with a scalpel in his hands, Bejarano slits a deep cut to expose some of the most nagging problems that choke today's societies: lack of communication, loneliness, fragility and powerlessness towards some of the major tribulations that bug human beings in today's world.
Blanco de la Cruz chimes in: "The point that Agustin Bejarano depicts life as a dawn or a sunset, as twilight or the noon blinding light is because life is not gone yet; it beats and vibrates in a hush in the prison cell and burden of silence. He depicts a silence he probably belongs to, or worse off if he belongs to those who have been silenced."
And Mr. de la Cruz goes on to say: "These rites are a token of strength with a sacred stature of its own that claims no mercy, a sign of abatement that under no circumstance implies a defeat. That's why he's chosen men untouched by frivolity, purely essential men in their daily chores (fishermen, peasants and utopians); men who carry their truths on their shoulders and seek the mercifulness of inner enlightenment from the bottom of heathen things; men who turn to meditation by either getting carried away with time, sitting in rundown wharves or climbing up rustic scaffolds, trapped in watercourses, flowing into a river, the sea or his own dreams."
We invite all Cuba Holidays makers to take a closer look at the works of Agustin Bejarano, this time around through The Rites of Silence, a new collection that seems to pierce the depths of the human soul and the artist's own universal vision.
